The present invention relates to an apparatus and system for managing the state of a network.
Together with widespread of the Internet, communication networks are used more and more by enterprises and organizations and occupy an important status as social infrastructure. If a failure occurs in a communication network, it is required to investigate the cause and take countermeasures.
A management protocol called Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is loaded in network apparatuses (hereinafter called an NW apparatus) constituting a communication network to establish a mechanism for detecting a failure rapidly by using an SNMP trap or performing alive monitoring of an NW apparatus itself by Internet Control Message Protocol ICMP.
Several methods have been developed for knowing a network state quickly when a failure occurs. For example, according to JP-A-1-288038, if all pieces of detailed information are collected from NW apparatuses when a failure occurs, it takes a fairly long time to process the collected information. The detailed information is therefore summarized in a subsystem, and failure information is analyzed from the summarized macro information. According to JP-A-2003-318901, if information is collected from all nodes when a network topology map is configured, it takes a long time. The topology map is therefore formed by using neighboring information possessed by each node to reduce a time taken to configure a topology map.
Although there are techniques of obtaining a network state quickly without collecting all pieces of information on NW apparatuses, there are no techniques of obtaining a network topology quickly by reflecting the influence of a failure when the failure occurs.